MediaTek to Join Samsung in the Mobile Octa-Core Game – Producing the MT6592 with 8 Cortex-A7 Cores

MediaTek has mostly been known for their low-cost and low-performance SoC’s used in many of the cheaper or budget devices. Especially in China. In fact, the Acer Iconia A1 that I’m in the process of reviewing right now is running on a quad-core MediaTek chip. And it’s definitely a low end chip, I’ll talk more about that chip specifically in the full review later this week.

Now MediaTek is getting ready to produce it’s upcoming MT6592. So why is this a big deal? Well the MT6592 is an octa-core SoC that maxes out at 2GHz. That should give your device some sure fire power right? This new SoC will be ready to be tested by various manufacturers by the end of July. It’ll be running with 8 Cortex-A7 processors made using the 28nm tech. There are some reports out there that the MT6592 is scoring over 30,000 points on AnTuTu. Which is about the same as the Snapdragon 800 from Qualcomm and Samsung’s Exynos 5410 SoC.

Samples will be ready for OEMs to use in testing their new devices this month, we aren’t expecting the MT6592 to be in any shipping devices until December 2013 at the earliest. MediaTek is already in most of the Chinese phones now, so I’d expect the new MT6592 to hit the Chinese market first in phones from ZTE, Huawei and others that are from China.

It’s great to see MediaTek getting serious about mobile processors. I just wished this octa-core processor they are working on was a bit more powerful. Say Cortex-A15 cores? But it does appear to be a true octa-core processor unlike the Exynos 5 Octa from Samsung which only runs on 4 cores at most. With 4 high powered cores, and 4 lower powered cores. We definitely need to see more competition in the SoC space. Right now Qualcomm is running away with all the business similar to Samsung with their phones and tablets.

How many of you would love to check out this new octa-core processor from MediaTek? I know I can’t wait to get my hands on a device sporting one of these. I’d love to compare it to the Snapdragon 800 and the Exynos 5 Octa as well.